Daniele Procida
on 6 August 2025
Last month Jon Seager (our Vice President for Ubuntu Engineering) wrote about crafting software:
Over the past decade, Canonical has been refining a family of tools called “crafts” to tame [the complexity of packaging software] and make building, testing, and releasing software across ecosystems much simpler.
Multiple Canonical products have craft in their names: Snapcraft, Charmcraft, Rockcraft (and there are others in the works). Our craft products are tools for making software, for the software craftsperson. To be a maker of tools comes with responsibilities – when you decide what tools should be like, you are also deciding how people should work.
Skill, power, technology
Why did we choose to refer to craft?
Craft implies artisanal values, work done by humans, skilled work of the hand.
Craft is not just an activity, it’s a value too.
It’s an excellent word. It comes from the Germanic kraft – strength, or power. That makes perfect sense: craft as skill or ability is a power. The word empower is so overused that it’s in danger of losing its own meaning, but here it really is appropriate: empowering people is what Canonical exists to do through open-source software.
In another direction, the ancient Greek word for craft is téchnē, the root of the modern word technology.
Technology has come to refer to the tools and machinery of industrial society, the hardware and software stuff we make, but it’s a more interesting word than that – technology, literally “the study of skill”: not merely a product of human activity, but a human endeavour itself.
So craft is a word that reaches in multiple directions. As kraft, it draws in meanings of power and empowerment. As téchnē, it connects directly to the root of our own industry. Craft is where things that matter and that we passionately care about all come together.
It’s a noble kind of word for a meaningful kind of activity.
The values of craft
Craft – skill – is obliged to improve itself through practice and reflection. These are fundamental values of craftsmanship, of making and being a maker. Choosing the name craft for our software tools signals a sense of obligation and seriousness about what we’re doing.
Jon’s article describes a family of tools designed with real intention. They share common interfaces, libraries and workflows – but they also share a common set of values, and that is why craft feels like the right concept to associate with the tools we want to put in the hands of software craftspeople.
